In back-to-back weeks, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have found themselves addressing poorly officiated calls that swung momentum in games.
Last week it was the bizarre double review that wiped out a fourth down conversion by Cade Otton, and this Sunday it was a phantom whistle that took an Antoine Winfield Jr. scoop-and-score off the board.
The play happened in the second quarter, when Jamel Dean stripped the ball loose to allow Winfield to pick it right up and run the distance for a score. Everyone assumed the play was live, including officials who were racing after the play to keep up, but that's not what ended up being the final ruling.
Ron Torbert announced that the play had been whistled dead, and while the turnover counted, the touchdown did not. FOX's broadcast showed a replay of the touchdown run, and both Kenny Albert and Jonathan Vilma were perplexed as to where the whistle was.
Head coach Todd Bowles was equally beside himself when talking about it after the game.
Todd Bowles scolds NFL officiating over whistle that cost Antoine Winfield Jr. a touchdown
During his postgame press conference, Bowles discussed the controversial call and was visibly frustrated and upset as he walked through it.
"I'm still pissed off over some of it," Bowles said. "We've got to do something, we'll discuss that with the league and go from there."
He elaborated further when asked about what the official told him after the ruling was made that a whistle had blown the play dead, even though nobody seems to have heard one.
"He said it was an erroneous whistle," Bowles said. "I mean, as soon as [Dean] hit him he stripped him so I don't know. I've got no answer to that."
It certainly sounds like officials messed up yet another call, which is a troubling trend that has been growing for quite some time now. This isn't a conspiracy, despite what some more hard lined fans might say on social media, but it is a case of officials doing a bad job at the only one they have.
When that happens enough, like it has with the NFL, it's not hard to fuel conspiracy theories even if the idea that games are rigged is utterly preposterous.
Tampa Bay has now been on the wrong side of more than a few of these calls, and it comes down to a lack of accountability. It dilutes the quality of the game -- something the NBA and WNBA are dealing with at the moment -- and it causes unnecessary frustrations to boil into conspiracy theories about games being rigged.
Whatever happened with the phantom whistle wasn't Big Daddy NFL pulling puppet strings, it was a bunch of guys making the wrong call that impacted the game -- which is even worse.